m97 Gallery No. 97 Moganshan Road 2F 200060 Shanghai Chine
In Buddhism, the fundamental concept of "impermanence" teaches that all living and non-living objects are in an unrelenting constant state of change. Time, existence, and consciousness itself are nothing more than a series of eternally changing impermanent instants. For the unprecedented frenzy of development that is modern China there is perhaps no more fitting a metaphor than dust. It's a sign of the old world and a sign of the new world. A sign of the ubiquitous concrete high-rise block and cavernous construction site. A sign of the demolished lanes and dwellings of ancient architecture, as well as a sign of pollution and an insatiable industrial appetite. In China, dust is the ever-looming particulate by-product of the physical metamorphosis that envelops the entire country and its people. For photography artist Li Jun, the phenomenon of dust that envelops the simple objects and possessions of his Chengdu apartment and the haunting traces the objects leave offers poetic empirical proof of his and their temporary impermanent existence, however ephemeral, amidst tumultuous environs and changing times.
Inspired by a startling dream, Yang Yi's photographs intend to capture the essence of his vanishing childhood hometown, recording the last bits of memories and the last inhabitants of the city before being flooded by the Three Gorges Dam project. In the sepia-colored works, the artist documented his hometown prior to its predestined fate and conceptually immerses the residents under water. A reverie of human life still persisting in this submerged, quiet town that inevitably has now been washed away.
Partners Meng Jin and Fang Er's first collaborative photography project, Love Hotel explores the two artists' ongoing interest in urban life, architecture, memory and found objects, and the inter-relationship between physical buildings, objects and their social context. The couple worked on-site within the framework of 3-hour 'rest' periods in various 'short-stay' hotels creating improvised, spontaneous sculpture works with the existing objects found in the rented love hotel rooms. Slightly amorphous structures, the rearranged inanimate objects hint at entangled anthropomorphic creations in this fantasy space devoid of actual human presence.